Okay, maybe not "kill" them, but at least pick off some of their
functionality.

Basically, Dropbox appears to want to become everyone's
hard-drive in the cloud. But not just a "hard drive." A sort of a
social storage network, in which your "friends"--those who you
allow to access your stuff--can, well, access your stuff.

It's platform agnostic. Dropbox works with
everything: Apple gadgets, Android gadgets, Microsoft gadgets, even RIM gadgets. Apple
only works with Apple gadgets. Why is that important? Because,
although a lot of people have Apple gadgets, a lot of people
don't. And people who have Apple gadgets occasionally want to
share things with people who don't (as impossible as that may
be to contemplate). Also, some individual people even
use multiple platforms. Maybe they have a PC at work and an
iPhone for themselves. Dropbox is a
great way to share stuff with yourself.

It allows you to share stuff with a wide number of
friends and colleagues. iCloud is private--for you.
Dropbox is private if you want it to be private, but it's also
open to whoever you want it to be, file by file. And that makes
it sort of a social network.

In other words, that stealthy Dropbox software is hanging around
all day waiting for me to plug in some device so it can insert
itself between the device manufacturer (in this case, Apple) and
the device manufacturer's storage repository.

I didn't give Dropbox permission to do that.

It just did it!

Assuming Dropbox doesn't annoy the crap out of its users with
popups like this, by the way, this is a smart strategy. Most
people will probably just click "start import" out of habit. And,
soon, they'll have filled up all their Dropbox storage and be
forced to buy more.

Moreover, they'll become addicted to Dropbox--because that's
where all their stuff will live and that's where they'll share it
with their friends. And the more addicted they get to Dropbox,
the less addicted they'll be to Apple, or whoever their
"platform" provider is.

(By the way, Apple appears to be aware of--and annoyed
by--Dropbox's ambitions, because it has recently
blocked apps that use Dropbox. How ironic, then, that Dropbox
just interrupted the communing of my iPhone and MacBook to siphon
off some of my data).

And the sharing activity that folks do on Dropbox, of course,
will be sharing activity that could have been done on Facebook or
Google. So Dropbox will be taking a bite out of those folks, as
well. All while doing something that Google and Facebook have
never managed to do--get paid directly by their users.

So you can see why folks are excited about Dropbox. Especially
now that its secret strategy is going live.